View change history of business services

SAVE AS PDF

View change history of business services

You can view changes made to a business service as a whole and to
individual configuration items (CIs) belonging to a service. Change history is useful for
maintenance,
planning,
or troubleshooting procedures.

Before you begin

The kind of change information gathered and displayed by ServiceNow depends on the Service Mapping setup.

Role
required: admin, sm_admin or sm_user

About this task

Information about changes to a business service or its CIs is stored in the CMDB.
Typically, these changes reflect adding or removing CIs from a business service,
upgrading or updating CIs. Service Mapping gathers
this data by querying CMDB tables and creates the change history view. The kind of
change information Service Mapping queries depends
on discovery patterns that Service Mapping uses to
discover CIs.

While in Service Mapping
you can see change records for specific CI in the context of business services, you
can also see detailed history of a specific CI separate from its business service as
described in History Timeline.

If the ServiceNow platform is
configured to validate changes, all changes are evaluated and rendered as valid or
not. If a change is valid, its change record in Service Mapping is marked as
approved. For more information about configuring the platform for change validation,
see Create or edit a planned validation script.

Changes to the business service appear on the history timeline.

Change marks appear differently depending on the nature of changes:

Light gray balloon ()

Unapproved change that does not influence the business service behavior.
For example, a change in a network path or adding a node to a
cluster.

Dark gray balloon ()

Unapproved change that changes the business service behavior.

Green balloon ()

An approved change in deployments where ServiceNow
platform is configured to validate changes.

Double balloon ()

Multiple separate changes that happened a short time from each
other.

If necessary, you can mark times on the history scale by creating baselines. It lets
you quickly return to the marked view.

Procedure

Navigate to Service Mapping > Business Services > Discovered Services.

Click View map for the business service for which you
what to see change history.

The Changes tab Service Mapping created
for this business service.

On the history timeline, set the time range of changes that you want to
view.

Option

Action

To set the time range of the history timeline

Click the hour, day, week, or month icons.

To increase or decrease the time range

Click the zoom in and zoom out icons.

To change the upper limit on your history range

Click on the history scale.

The time that serves as the upper limit appears above the
history timeline.

Note:

You cannot set the lower limit on your history range to a time
before this business service was created. This time is marked
with the Business Service Created event
on the history scale.

The map shows the history view of the business service for the time you
selected.

Note: The Change tab displays all change
records even if the ones, which are filtered out of the history
view.

To mark a time on the time scale, set a baseline:

Click the Compare icon.

Navigate to the time you want to mark as a baseline on the history
scale.

Click Set baseline.

Enter the name of the baseline and click
OK.

The new baseline appears as a button above the history scale and as a
blue flag on the history scale.

View the change history:

Option

Action

To see the CI responsible for a change record

Select a change record on the Changes
tab.

The related CI is marked yellow in the map.

To see only change records related to a CI

Select the required CI or the connection on the map.

The
Changes tab displays only change records
related to the selected CI or connection.

To see network at the selected moment in the past

Set the time on the history scale.

Right-click on the connection and select Show network
path.

The new tab opens displaying the network
or storage path map for the time you selected.

Note: You cannot view the network path for connections marked as
boundaries to this business service.

To exit the history view and see the current status of the business service,
click the current icon.